It’s very much a prototype but I have to share a preview of the interface @djevans.bsky.social is working on for our Viral Texts data—it maps reprinting data back onto the newspaper page, allowing users to browse what reprints appeared together on each page—with links back to full reprint clusters

All 4 positions are open rank & all could result in multiple hires. Folks from the DH/book history/bibliography worlds might look especially at the "Information, Culture, & Society" & open information sciences positions to see if anything resonates—happy to offer what insight I can

Job alert! @ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree... Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

why intern at Ai2? 🐟interns own major parts of our model development, sometimes even leading whole projects 🐡we're committed to open science & actively help our interns publish their work reach out if u wanna build open language models together 🤝 links 👇

🆕 from us at #EMNLP: Are LMs better at answering questions about Germany in German than in French? Is national knowledge linguistically contingent? Interestingly, only for some multilingual models is this true. Aya knows China best in Chinese, but LLaMA's best in English always.

While lead author @sunnytqin.bsky.social sadly couldn't go to her !!!HOMETOWN!!!! of Suzhou due to visa reentry issues, her EMNLP paper with @dmelis.bsky.social and me is still fantastically cool and I will absolutely take advantage of EMNLP week to reshare it.

This was joint work with @abertsch.bsky.social, Maria-Emil Deal, and @strubell.bsky.social Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.20926 Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/fic...

Digital humanities researchers often care about fine-grained similarity based on narrative elements like plot or tone, which don’t necessarily correlate with surface-level textual features. Can embedding models capture this? We study this in the context of fanfiction!

I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂 Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about! Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!

Here's an interesting new study exploring whether LLMs are able to understand the narrative sequencing of comics and... even the best AI models are *terrible* at it for pretty much all tasks that were analyzed aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit." This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...

When is a language hard to model? Previous research has suggested that morphological complexity both does and does not play a role, but it does so by relating the performance of language models to corpus statistics of words or subword tokens in isolation.

As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that. So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more. Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort! bit.ly/ach-anthology

Spent a day at this wonderful initiative by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University and supported by Mellon Foundation! Feel free to reach out to the leadership if you have ideas on how to help their mission or how they can help your research efforts. publicinterestcorpus.org

Not every protest can be across the street from a luthier.

This is happening a little, but only a little. Higher ed is a napping giant, of sorts, relatively trusted, with high approval, with very well cultivated networks with latent possibilities for mobilization.

The possibility is for universities to reach out to explain how the current moment is undermining their ability to achieve these essential values, to mobilize people's outreach to elected officials, & to do this in a way that is coordinated across institutions.

Large majorities see universities/higher ed as important to things that they value (the economy, science, health), & substantial numbers indicate a willingness to be mobilized to support universities that they have a connection to.

Those of you at universities might share our recent report on public opinion with their leadership. There are takeaways that are highly relevant to their choices in the current moment. In particular, there is broad, bipartisan, but latent, support for higher education. edbarometer.org

Small models work great for GLAM but there aren't enough examples! With @wjbmattingly.bsky.social I'm launching small-models-for-glam on @hf.co to create/curate models that run on modest hardware and address GLAM use cases. Follow the org to keep up-to-date! huggingface.co/small-models...

Humans created AI, and we can still shape its future. That is why @macfound joined a broad coalition of our peers to launch Humanity AI, a new initiative to keep people at the center of our AI future. Learn more: humanityai.ai

New issue of my newsletter: “The Library’s New Entryway” — An interface that combines the advantages of the traditional index with the power of LLMs is the path forward newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

It's been brewing for months: @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social releases CoMMA (Corpus of Multilingual Medieval Archives) ! 📚 2.5bn tokens of mostly Latin and French texts 🕰️ 800→1600 CE 📜 23k manuscripts 🖥️ 18k on the reading interface: comma.inria.fr 🔍 Paper: inria.hal.science/hal-05299220v1 (1/🧵)

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

The next Historical Network Research conference will be held in Turin, Italy in July 2026, and submissions are now open. Proposals due December 1. Bursaries available for early career scholars. This year's theme is "Networks and their Sources." See you there! hnr2026.sciencesconf.org

📣 Life update: Thrilled to announce that I’ll be starting as faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems this Fall! I’ll be recruiting PhD students in the upcoming cycle, as well as research interns throughout the year: lasharavichander.github.io/contact.html

Also, if you're at COLM, come to Gillian's keynote and find out what our lab is working on!

Excited that longtime Viral Texts collaborator Avery Blankenship’s *American Literature* article is out—stemming from a chapter of her diss, it outlines her research using infrared spectroscopy to analyze food stains in C19 cookbooks—interesting for DH, book history, bibliography, and foodies alike

... the Chinese Room (John Searle, 1980), Mary’s Room (Frank Jackson, 1982), Winograd Schema Challenge (Hector J. Levesque, 2011), Story Cloze Test (Allen Institute, 2016), among others. They are minimal literary forms used as a yardstick for intelligence. 2/2

The history of AI evaluation is full of thought experiments grounded in language: the Turing test (Turing, 1950), the Wug Test (Gleason, 1958), the General Problem Solver (Newell & Simon, 1959), the Frame Problem (McCarthy & Hayes, 1969), Scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977), the Chinese Room... 1/2

🗓️ We are thrilled to announce the Call for Papers for the conference+journal track of the 5th annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies, May 28-29, 2026, in #Potsdam, #Germany! #CCLS26 #CfP Submit your article by January 8, 2026, and be part of our big 5-year jubilee edition! 🥳🥳🥳

🚨Job ALERT🚨! My old postdoc is available! I cannot emphasize enough how much a life-altering position this was for me. It gave me the experience that I needed for my current role. As a postdoc, I was able to define my projects and acquire a lot of new skills as well as refine some I already had.

I did a QA with Quanta about interpretability and training dynamics! I got to talk about a bunch of research hobby horses and how I got into them.

Accepted to EMNLP (and more to come 👀)! The camera ready version is now online---very happy with how this turned out arxiv.org/abs/2507.01234

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

A few days ago, amidst everything else, I pressed send on the book I've been working on (and off) for over a decade. It's still a long way from finished, but the final phase has begun. Watch for DATA BY DESIGN: FROM THE HISTORY OF VISUALIZATION TO THE FUTURE WE NEED in print and online in Fall 2026!

Story as model, rather than as theory or history or lie, is an underrated idea.

My lab is running a study to investigate how serendipity relates to information seeking in digital collections. We're looking for researchers & practitioners who have used, designed, or stewarded digital collections to participate in our survey (<10 min): forms.gle/zGJDZZ14vx2M...

Does anyone know of work on what the use of fiction in studying psychology tells us about what people learn from narratives in general? Empirical reading studies or psycholinguistics folks? Many psych experiments aren't live-action role playing (e.g., Stanford prison experiment) but reading stories.

Excited to be co-editing a special issue of @dhquarterly.bsky.social on Artificial Intelligence for Digital Humanities: Research problems and critical approaches dhq.digitalhumanities.org/news/news.html We're inviting abstracts now - please feel free to reach out with any questions!

At long last, I can post my team's summer project: applied modules to teach how ML/AI tools are changing social science and humanities research: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/ Highlights: LegalBERT to analyze anti/pro-immigrant sentiment in 19th c. BC law: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/d... 🧵1

Today I'm looking for cultural analytics papers that incorporate *both* vision and language. Any favorites? I'll put a couple of mine below to start! ↳

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

Pre-announcement of a funding opportunity for "artificial intelligence humanities sandpits," supported by AHRC, EPSRC, and SSHRC. Expressions of interest by 31 Oct; up to four grants will be funded.

Important work from @dgrand.bsky.social looking at political persuasion from generative AI Good news/bad news: it worked. “Friendliness” and use of facts seemed to be primary drivers #pacss2025 #polnet2025

Submission deadline has been extended to September 12th! Everyone tell your friends! Submit your paper to this awesome workshop! wordplay-workshop.github.io

What if OCR models could show you their thought process? NuMarkdown-8B-Thinking from NuMind (YC S22) doesn't just extract text - it reasons through documents first. Could be pretty valuable for weird historical documents? Example here: davanstrien-ocr-time-capsule.static.hf.space/index.html?d...

For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social. It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought. #kidlit #booksky 🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

What are your favorite recent papers on using LMs for annotation (especially in a loop with human annotators), synthetic data for task-specific prediction, active learning, and similar? Looking for practical methods for settings where human annotations are costly. A few examples in thread ↴